Self Help For Partisans

As a public space in which good faith civil democratic debate can take place, I think the United States is pretty much finished. As Cass Sunstein framed it in a recent column for Bloomberg, America is beset by what he calls “Political Manicheanism”, where “political issues are seen not as reasonable disputes among fellow citizens, but instead as pitting decent people with decent character against horrible people with horrible character.” Basically, it’s good versus evil, with each side seeing itself as the good guys. 

We could probably have a good discussion about why this is the case. Does the steady march towards polarization go back to Reagan, or Nixon, or Kennedy? Is it the fault of Republicans, or of Democrats, or is the whole political system to blame? Is it third party financing? The media? And if it’s the media, is it Fox News, or CNN? Was it the FCC’s elimination of the Fairness Doctrine? Is it the because of the decline of mainstream media, or is it the internet - and is that just tomayto/tomahto? Is social media the real culprit, or fake news? Is it adherence to “balance” in journalism that drives the appetite for partisan media, or is it a bulwark against it?

And so on.

What is not really up for debate is the reality of the situation. Shortly after Trump got elected, I described American politics as “two troops of apes shrieking at one another across a great partisan divide.” That hasn’t changed, though the shrieking has got louder as the divide has got wider.

What has changed, though, is how the situation as evolved up here in Canada. We’ve long flattered ourselves that our politics is more civil than in the US, maybe because there’s less money involved, or because the stakes are lower, or our system is better, or our media are more concentrated, or just maybe because we’re all so much nicer.

But if the last few weeks of #cdnpoli Twitter are any sort of weathervane, Canadian politics is well down the same path as we’ve seen in America, perhaps irreversibly so. I’m not going to name names or describe incidents or exchanges -- if you’re paying the slightest attention, you know what I’m talking about. And arguing about who started it only underscores the problem: A line seems to have been crossed, where even the politicians and other actors who have seemed most committed to resisting the tug of Manicheanism have decided to go all in on painting their opponents not as basically decent people with different views on things, but as horrible people with horrible character. And again: I don’t think either side is blameless in all of this.

At some level, we all know that we’re entering a pretty dark place. And it is tempting to see correlation as causation and conclude that social media is a big part of the problem. (I think it is certainly part of the problem -- go read the first two thirds of Joe Heath’s Enlightenment 2.0 for the argument.) But we need to be wary of going full McLuhan on the situation, as Colin Horgan did on Twitter: The medium is the message, the message is garbage, so the fixing the medium will fix the problem. QED.

The problem with blaming the medium is it leads to hoping that if we only heckle the New York Times editorial page editors enough, or bully newspapers into calling Trump a liar in their headlines, or if enough of us complain to Jack Dorsey about Twitter bots or parody accounts, or we hold a mass prayer for Zuckerberg to be hit by a bus or for Facebook to be broken up by regulators -- then things will go back to the way they were.

But it’s not going to happen. This is the world we've built. It reflects who were are, our dispositions, our biases and our values. There’s no business model, regulation, or filter waiting to be discovered that is going to save us. As Craig Forcese wrote on Twitter, “The problem stems, not from the medium, but from ourselves.”  And the ourselves who are most to blame for all of this are the partisans.

***

Look, some of my best friends are partisans. But there is something fundamentally wrong with the partisan brain. People -- smart, educated people -- who seem to have their feet firmly planted in the realm of reason and logic, cause and effect, inference and deduction, fairness and good judgment, suddenly lose their minds when faced with an issue over which there is partisan advantage to be had, or when a threat to their tribe’s hold on power looms.

And so in the interests of offering friendly but also urgently self-interested advice, here are three principles or guidelines partisans need follow that will help lead them back to Planet Sanity.

1. “What if my opponent did that?”

 Shortly after the Liberals came to power in 2015, I had the idea of starting a blog called “What if Stephen Harper did that?”, which would simply link to something the Trudeau government did and ask the obvious question. Because despite riding to power on a wave of good intentions, in a lot of ways -- its control over Parliament, the lack of transparency and the abuse of process, the torquing of public policy initiatives for partisan advantage -- this government is no better than the one it replaced.

Of course, they don’t see it that way. No one ever does, because people tend to interpret their own behaviour in light of what they see as their true motives. And because they see their motives as fundamentally good,  the Liberals give themselves a pass for engaging in the behaviours for which they crucified Stephen Harper.

But here’s the thing: Stephen Harper almost certainly interpreted his own behaviour in exactly the same way. He no doubt justified his own control freakery and partisan gamesmanship on the same grounds -- that it was in the service of the public interest. To respond that no, what Harper was doing was advancing partisan interests makes the fundamental partisan error: “what I do is in the public interest, what my opponent does is for partisan reasons.”

Looking at your own actions the way your opponent might see them is very difficult, but you have to try. What you see might surprise you.

2. The principle of charity

 The requirement that you assume your political opponent has more or less the same goals that you have -- namely, making the world a better place - is just a specific form of a more general injunction, which is that you should always begin with the assumption that your opponents are rational. That is, you should assume that their beliefs are for the most part true, and that their beliefs and desires are connected to each other and to reality in some plausible way.

This is what philosophers call the “principle of charity.” It comes in various versions of varying strength, but the core of it is a demand that we interpret someone’s statements and behaviour in the most rational way possible. That is, we should avoid attributing irrationality, delusion, or bad faith to someone when a coherent or rational interpretation can be had. That doesn’t mean there are no irrational or deluded people, nor does it mean that no one ever acts in bad faith. But as Joe Heath puts it in Enlightenment 2.0, “If our understanding of the world depends crucially upon the claim that everyone else is an idiot, evil, on the take, or part of the conspiracy, then the problem almost certainly lies with our understanding and not with the world.”

In short, before calling your opponent insane, a lunatic, a criminal, or a total moron, check to make sure you are giving the best possible interpretation of those views that maximizes their status as rational people.

Applying the principle of charity is a good way of doing this. But an even better approach is to try to pass the ideological turing Test.

3. The ideological Turing Test

 You remember the original Turing Test, in which Alan Turing proposed to replace the ineffable question “can machines think?” with the behavioural question of whether a machine could interact with a human in a way that was indistinguishable from human to human interaction. As Turing saw it, if a human couldn’t tell the difference, then there was no further question as to whether the machine was actually thinking.

The ideological Turing Test is the brainchild of the economist Bryan Caplan, and it is designed as a test to see whether a partisan truly understands the arguments of his or her opponent. The idea is that the partisan (say, a Liberal) is asked to answer questions or write an essay in which they are posing as their ideological opponent (say, a Conservative). If a neutral judge can’t tell the difference between the arguments of a true Conservative and those of the Liberal trying to “pass” as a Conservative, then we can conclude that the Liberal does genuinely comprehend the Conservative point of view. 

How many Liberals out there think they could seriously pass as Conservatives, and vice versa? It’s not an idle question. Because if you can’t credibly represent your opponent’s views, this means a few things. First, you probably don’t understand those views. Second, this means you can’t have a proper argument with them. Which means you are probably not taking their ideas seriously, which means, finally, that what you’re doing on is not debating them, or arguing, but performing.

***

And maybe that’s the big problem -- that everyone has stopped arguing with their opponents, and has decided to simply perform for their supporters.

Bagehot famously wrote:

Of all modes of enforcing moderation on a party, the best is to contrive that the members of that party shall be intrinsically moderate, careful, and almost shrinking men; and the next best to contrive, that the leaders of the party, who have protested most in its behalf, shall be placed in the closest contact with the actual world. Our English system contains both contrivances: it makes party government permanent and possible in the sole way in which it can be so, by making it mild.

 Once upon a time Parliament may have been composed of moderate, careful, and shrinking men and women. But that is no longer the case. Moreover, it would appear that whatever contact our representatives have with the actual world, it is not making them moderate and mild in their interactions with one another.

As Bagehot saw, party government in a parliamentary system must be mild if it is to be possible at all. And if our representatives can’t see their way to helping themselves out of their partisan echo chambers, if they can’t see their way back, to treating one another as rational interlocutors acting in good faith, then we are well and truly screwed.

It Might Get Loud: Some thoughts on obsession, addiction, and freedom

 

This is the second of what I hope will be an ongoing series of posts on the themes of obsession and authenticity. To see where I'm coming from, maybe read the first one  before continuing below.

***

I finally got around to watching It Might Get Loud, the documentary film by Davis Guggenheim that brings together Jimmy Page, Jack White, and The Edge to talk about music and their careers, and to jam with one another and teach one another some tricks. It’s been out for almost a decade, and it’s one of those films I’ve been both dying to see, while ever so slightly slightly dreading.

And sure enough, about halfway through, I started to get a familiar feeling: I started to regret not having taken my own guitar playing more seriously. It was at the point in the film where the three of them are talking about their first guitars, and how much they loved those first instruments from the moment they got their hands on them.

Like a lot of my friends, I saved up for an electric guitar in high school. I paid $120 for a second hand piece of crap Stratocaster knockoff that played terribly and sounded worse. I never liked the guitar, and couldn’t tell you where it is now; I think maybe my brother used it for spare parts.

To some extent, the stories Page, White, and Edge tell are not unlike the experience a lot of kids have -- getting your first guitar, playing in bands going nowhere, bonding with schoolmates over music, struggling for an identity. But for me that’s more or less where it stopped. I’m musically anti-talented, and certainly wasn’t obsessed with music or the guitar the way some guys were. Even during the short time when I was in a band, I could barely get up the motivation to practice much. I loved the idea of having a guitar a lot more than I loved having a guitar. 

So it was probably inevitable that my career as a guitar hero never really went anywhere. So why the twinge of regret?

It wasn’t for the music, or its absence. It was, as it always is, for the absence of something, anything, to play the role that music plays for Edge or Jack White or Jimmy Page.  I mean just LOOK at their faces when, for example, Page shows them the riff to Whole Lotta Love:

 Call it passion, call it love, call it obsession. Not everyone has it, and if you don't you can't fake it.

The regret for its absence is the same regret I feel watching movies like Dogtown and Z Boys or Jiro Dreams of Sushi, or reading books like Barbarian Days, or every two years watching the Olympics: a dissatisfaction with the realization I have never taken something so seriously that it dominates my life, and probably never will.   

Not everyone who is obsessed becomes a famous musician or athlete or chef or artist, and not every famous musician or athlete or chef or artist is obsessed. In fact, there’s a fascinating bit in It Might Get Loud, when the three guitarists talk about the place of music in their life. In one scene, the Edge is walking through his old high school and he points to a noticeboard in the hall where Larry Mullen Jr., the drummer for U2, had put up an ad looking for a guitarist. The Edge matter-of-factly says that if he hadn’t seen the notice, or hadn’t answered it, who knows if he’d even be a musician. If he hadn’t answered that ad on the board, he says, “I might be doing anything. I might be a banker.”

Compare this with Jack White, who was the tenth of ten children, most of whom were musicians. Can you imagine him doing anything else? You know whatever happened in his life, Jack White would be making music. But the real contrast here is with Jimmy Page talking about his relationship with music:  

“Whether I took it on, or it took me on, I don't know.  The jury's out on that. But I don't care. I just really really enjoyed it."

This is the sort of thing you can imagine Keith Richards saying about his own guitar playing, or Laird Hamilton saying about surfing, or Ivan Orkin about cooking. Did they choose their calling, or did it choose them? It’s a pointless question.

And that of course is why it is pointless for me to keep going through this exercise where I drink deeply of someone else’s obsession, only to sigh and wonder why I don’t share it. The problem is not that I didn’t try harder to become obsessed with something. I didn’t try harder at something because I wasn’t obsessed. I didn’t call it, because it wasn’t calling me.

The essence of a true obsession is that it serves as a complete and final answer to the question: what to do? That is, it reduces the whole range of questions that preoccupy a normal life -- who to love, what to do, where to live, how to be -- and reduces them to a single question: how do I feed my obsession?

And so obsession is a close relative of addiction. For addicts, too, the addiction reduces life’s multitude down to a single overriding goal -- getting the next fix. Think for example of Renton’s famous “Choose Life” speech from Trainspotting, and it’s killer kicker: “Who needs reasons, when there’s heroin?”

Aside from the moral judgment of society, is there anything to distinguish an obsession from an addiction? What’s the difference between the two?

Back before he died but when his emphysema was slowly robbing him of his lifeforce, Peter Gzowski started talking and writing about his lifelong addiction to cigarettes. He smoked three packs a day, which could only be achieved, he noted, by lighting up the minute he rolled out of bed, and butting out just before turning out the lights.  But I remember he said something to the effect that, when he took his first drag on a cigarette, he knew immediately that it was for him -- it was like his body had found its soulmate.

That sounds more than a bit like Jimmy Page on his relationship to music. Except here’s what else Peter Gzowski had to say about his smoking:

"If anyone asked, and they did, all the time, I'd say I hated my habit. It's hard to duck the fact that I probably hated myself for being such a slave to it."

And that is ultimately the difference between and addiction and an obsession:

The first is enslavement, the second is freedom. 

Elections for Naifs and Cynics: A primer

A few years ago, I wrote a post in which I described a blunt taxonomy of political attitudes. I suggested that everyone falls somewhere on the line (which is a continuum) between political naifs, at one extreme, and political cynics, at the other. My primary claim was that naifs believe that politics is fundamentally about devising and implementing good policy. Cynics believe that it is about acquiring and exercising power. 

While virtually no one is a pure cynic or unalloyed naif, I think there is no doubt that the distinction does articulate two clear approaches to understanding how politics does, or ought to, function. I also think that understanding whether a given columnist is coming at things from one side or the other can be a useful heuristic for understanding the argument that is being made. 

At any rate, the original post gets tweeted and mentioned on social media fairly regularly by people whose work I respect and admire, so it suggests to me that I'm not the only one who finds the schema useful. We're into the election season now, so I took some time to sketch out an election primer for naifs and cynics. There's obviously a lot more to say, so I might see if this post can be expanded over the course of the campaign. (I'm also happy to take requests or suggestions for other ways of expanding the analyis). 

Some Guiding Principles

1. Everyone is a naif about their own political committments.

2. Everyone is a cynic about their opponents' political committments. 

3. Everyone is a meta-cynic about politics. That is, both cynics and even naifs are more interested in appearing cynical (or naive) to members of their tribe (of cynics or naifs) than they are interested in actually adhering to cynical or naive principles. 

4. We could all stand to be a bit more cynical about politics, and more naive about our meta-political committments. 

Ok with that on the table, let's get started.

Elections for Naifs

What is an election? For naïfs, an election is the opportunity for a national debate. As Andrew Coyne puts it, an election is “a conversation among the voters”, the outcome of which is a collective decision about what policies we should like our government to implement over the next four years or so.

The writ period is the time we have set aside for this conversation: the media deploys its resources to cover and facilitate that conversation, people open their doors to candidates, the pundits weigh in on how that conversation is going and try to help improve it. On this view, the longer the writ period the better, because the more time spent deliberating and debating, the sounder will be the reasoning that ultimately prevails.

Platforms: The most crucial element in an election for naïfs is the party platform. This is the document that lays out the policies the party promises to enact once in power. Ideally, the platform advances a consistent package of evidence-based policies, properly costed out, with a sincere and credible plan for how the money will be raised and the policies implemented.

Debates: For naïfs, debates between leaders play a key role in the election to the extent to which they are able to facilitate and amplify this national conversation, focused on the various party platforms. Debates should be about the substance of major issues – Defence, Foreign Affairs, Health Care, the Environment – such that voters are left enlightened and informed with respect to the choice they face. By the same token, naïfs dread talk of the “knockout blow”, the largely fictitious moment when one leader completely pwns another, destroying his candidacy with one snappy line.

Polls: Naifs tend to decry polls and the effect they have on the nature of the conversation among voters. Polls, according to naïfs, reduce elections to “horserace politics” or a “popularity contest.”

The Vote: The ballot box is the moment when the naïve voter gives his or her verdict on the outcome of the national conversation. By casting a ballot, the naïve voter chooses one candidate over the rest, or one party over the others, in the aim of giving that party a mandate to enact its platform.

The electoral system should aggregate these votes and translate them into seats in parliament in a manner that reflects the proportion of votes received. Power, that is, should be proportional to support. A party that gets 15% of the votes should get 15% of the seats, which should then translate into 15% of the power that the government exercises. A majority government should only be installed if a party indeed receives a majority of votes.  Hence the strong support amongst naïfs for electoral systems that involve proportional representation, and the source of the strength behind the slogan “make every vote count”.

Elections for Cynics

What is an election? For the political cynic, an election is what Schumpeter described as a competitive struggle between elites for the peoples’ votes. It is first and foremost a mechanism for the orderly transfer of power and the cycling of elites; or if you prefer, an election is an instrument that allows the people to throw the bums out (and replace them with a new set of bums).

The writ period is the time we have set aside for this competition to play out. The role of the media is largely to heckle, to cheer and jeer, and to analyse, much like fans in the sporting arena. For cynics, a longer writ period serves to demonstrate certain things about the relevant players – their stamina, their resources – but as that arch-cynic Kim Campbell put it,  "an election is no time to discuss serious issues."

Platform: Cynics don’t put much stock in party platforms as statements of policy. For the cynic, the party platform is more like an online dating profile than it is a curriculum vitae. That is, the cynic doesn’t much care if the policies are ideologically consistent, properly costed out, or have coherent implementation strategies. Rather, the platform is how the party signals its leadership of a political tribe. The platform is ultimately how the party defines its market niche in the competitive struggle.

Debates: Cynics find debates useful to the extent that they allow voters to evaluate which set of elites they will entrust with the business of governing. And so the cynical voter will be less concerned, during the debate, with the details of policies and their implementation. Instead, the cynic looks for how the debates signal leadership traits such as competence, coolness, and charisma. The sparring nature of debates is appealing to cynics precisely because it provides the opportunity for these traits to reveal themselves. If a party leader does suffer a “knockout blow,” for the cynic that signals much about that leader’s ability to handle the pressures of high office.

Polls: Cynics love polls, precisely because the election is a popularity contest. Following polls is like following the announcer’s call of the Preakness or the Belmont -- it’s a gauge of how the race is going, and we all get to cheer on our favourite political tribe.  At the same time, polls allow parties to evaluate their progress and adjust their strategies accordingly. Public polling allows voters to calibrate their own voting strategy in light of where the electorate seems to be headed. So for example, if a cynical voter is hell bent on throwing out the current set of bums no matter what the cost, she might change who she plans to vote for by looking at which opposition party the polls say has the best shot at winning.

The Vote: For cynics, voting is foremost an exercise in tribal support and affiliation. The cynic votes for the party whose brand or identity they find most appealing, regardless of platform specifics. At the same time, for politically disaffected cynics the major function of the election is to enable democratic control over the cycling of political elites. As noted in the previous section, the cynical voter might then be inclined to vote strategically: It will matter more them that “their side loses” than “my side wins”.

Because political power is indivisible and rival, enabling the cycling of elites is the crucial function of the electoral system. Its effectiveness is to be measured by how well it accomplishes this, not by how it allocates seats or apportions power. In a society marked by deep diversity and profound disagreement about the proper goals of the government, an electoral system that that allows power to be gained and controlled by a workable plurality of voters might be not only acceptable, but even welcome.

Homework:  Read the Liberal Party's recent Real Change manifesto, and try to place it on the naive/cynical continuum. Once you have done that, try to give that placement a cynical interpretation. That is, ask yourself what political tribe are the Liberals trying to appeal to with this manifesto.  

The normalization of the extraordinary, and other thoughts on Ferguson

1. As the events play out each night, we can't ignore the fact that for a great many people, rioting is fun. All the protestors are not on the side of the angels.

That said, what we are seeing in Ferguson is, more or less, the making explicit of a number of post-9/11 trends in North America, beginning with :

2. The permanence of the temporary: the extraordinary police and judicial powers that were awarded immediately after 9/11 under the guise of defending liberalism against clear and present danger have become entrenched. To this extent, we have validated the Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt's view that liberal democracy is at core a sham, because it is unable to defend itself on its own terms.

3. The normalization of the special: The S in SWAT might as well be changed to N, since we have asked police at all levels to be faster and more aggressive in their response to potential terrorist threats. Don't wait for backup if someone is shooting up a school, and so on. But this means giving beat cops tactical shotguns and Kevlar.

4.The militarization of policing in North America, especially the United States, has been a recognizable problem for a few years now. The most obvious problem of course is the outfitting of even rinky dinky county cop shops with LAVs and sniper rifles and MRAPs and camo and all the rest.

5. This is partly a response to points 2 and 3 above - that is, it was driven by the feds -- but don't discount the visceral desire by many cops, especially those too dumb or too fat or too old or too young or too risk averse to have fought in Iraq or Afghanistan, to "get some". The more they are kitted out like the army or the marines, the more they are going to feel like soldiers, and the more they are going to want to act like soldiers, and the more they are going to want to earn their stripes in something resembling combat.

6. That is why the real problem with what we are seeing in Ferguson is not the equipment, but the culture. And by that I don't just mean the culture of policing, but our culture as a whole. Over the past decade, the dominant themes and motifs of our culture have become increasingly militaristic. Partly it's video games, but that's just a small part of it. Stuff that is essentially gym gear is now branded as "combat" or "tactical". People used to go running or to the gym, now they do Spartan Races or Tough Mudder courses and go to cross-fit, which has its origins in the military. Weekend warriors no longer play paintball, instead they participate in compressed versions of the SEALs hell week. And so on.

7. What gets lost in all of this is the extent to which the military is a distinct culture, and you can't simply give its gear and its training methods to police and expect good results. One thing that is interesting about the military is the rigorous legal, administrative, and moral codes that govern the use of force. You could call it "honour" but you'd just get laughed at, but a number of veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have been commenting on social media about how the police in Ferguson have operated under far looser rules of engagement than the soldiers did walking patrol in Fallujah or Kandahar.

8. This alone should make everyone stop and think really really hard about what has happened to policing, because

9. Enforcing the law and maintaining the civil order in a constitutional democracy is fundamentally different from forcing a political outcome upon a foreign power through the use of violence and deadly force. They are so different that the very notion that the equipment, training methods, culture, and norms that govern them should be shared is insane.

Exercise for further discussion: The Libertarian Conundrum

10: The events in Ferguson pose an interesting problem for libertarians.  While it has been gratifying to see people like Mark Steyn chime in on the absolute gong show that is law enforcement in America, people like him quickly run up hard against what we can call the Libertarian Conundrum:

On the one hand, libertarians are in favour of what has been called the "night watchman" state. The state should enforce contracts, protect property, life and liberty against assault and theft, but otherwise leave people alone.

But a big part of leaving people alone is letting them own guns, so a libertarian society is one that will likely have a large number of individuals armed with military-grade weaponry. And as a number of police officials in the US have pointed out, we can't have police forces trying to enforce the law with revolvers when they are going up against people armed with AR-15s.

So if you're a libertarian, you have a problem. You can have your guns, or you can have your minimal state, but you can't have both. It would be interesting to debate which is worse, the Nanny State, or the Military State.

 

How the world works

*Comments are open for this post*

Nature matters more than nurture

Sex matters more than gender

Friends matter more than parents

Situation matters more than character

Norms matter more than laws

Institutions matter more than culture

Economics matters more than morality

Family matters more than state

Narrative matters more than truth

Identity matters more than rationality

Cohort matters more than generation

Class matters more than income

Status matters more than well-being

Race matters

Why Rob Ford is the Amy Winehouse of Canadian politics

They tried to make me go to rehab but I said 'no, no, no' — singer Amy Winehouse, before dying of alcohol poisoning.

"Everything's going fine" — Toronto mayor Rob Ford, last week, after a bunch more staffers resigned. 

By now it is pretty clear that whatever else he may be, Toronto mayor Rob Ford is a very sick man. He suffers from any number of pathological cravings, obsessions, and addictions, from food to sex to booze to whatever else. And like all addicts, he has more than his share of enablers — people who helpfully pave his road to self-destruction even as they pretend to be acting in his best interests.

I’m talking about the innumerable pundits and reporters and fly-by-night political commentators who have spent the better part of the last three years telling everyone who would listen that Rob Ford’s vices are actually virtues, that his addictions are features, not bugs, and that the Unique Selling Proposition that the mayor uses to keep Ford Nation barking at the moon is the fact that he’s “authentic”.

What is authenticity, and why does it matter to politics? That’s a tough question to answer in a short space — I wrote an entire book about the subject and don’t think I even really got to the heart of the matter. But like a lot of bad ideas, the cult of authenticity seems to have entered our political vernacular from the United States, where there has been, over the past decade, a growing conviction that the biggest problem with politics these days is that our leaders are not authentic enough.

The argument goes something like this: modern politics has become dominated by large political parties and their shiny, prefab leaders who are about image not substance, who speak only in sound bites and talking points, govern with both eyes on the overnight tracking poll, and who delight in breaking their promises while pretending they never made them in the first place and demonizing their opponents while purporting to take the high road. Modern politics is mass-marketed phoniness, and it is no surprise the electorate is completely alienated.

What we crave (to continue the story) is authenticity.  The American writer Joe Klein signposted the search for the authentic in his 2006 book Politics Lost, an essay about the decline of authenticity in presidential politics. Klein took his inspiration from what he called Harry Truman's "Turnip Day" speech at the Democratic convention in 1948 that confirmed his nomination for president. Coming on stage after midnight, speaking plainly, simply, and without notes, Truman challenged the "do-nothing Congress" to act upon those views they claim to endorse, and get back to work.

Klein thinks we need more Turnip Day moments, more politicians like Truman. He argued politicians need to "figure out new ways to engage and inspire us — or maybe just some simple old ways, like saying what they think as plainly as possible."

It’s a good anecdote. The problem is now every authenticity-mongering pundit wants their own Turnip Day homily with which to beat the audience into submission. The most famous variation is David Brooks’ throw-away line about how Americans always vote for the presidential candidate they would most like to have a beer with. (A principle which, if true, would see Joe Biden elected president-for-life.)

A year and a half ago, the Canadian pundit Allan Gregg delivered a lecture to the Public Policy Forum called "On Authenticity: How the Truth can Restore Faith in Politics and Government” in which he claimed that our leaders' most systematic failure is that "they have not picked up on the electorate's craving for authenticity nor adjusted their behaviour to conform to this new reality."

Gregg had his own Turnip Day homily to explain just what he's getting at. He tells a story about the night he went to see a band in a club in Manhattan when the guitar player's electric pickup broke. Instead of stopping the show to fix the guitar, the band unplugged their instruments, moved closer to one another, and performed an intimate number. "As the last chord was struck, the room literally exploded with rapturous cheering, hooting."

Gregg saw a lesson in this for our politicians. What they need to do, he suggested, is unplug from the way they've always done things and try to reconnect with the electorate. They must drop the prefab talking points designed to "conceal meaning." They need to stop claiming to be the only island of virtue in a sea of knaves. They should cancel all political advertising, and talk straight to the people, saying what they mean and meaning what they say.

And the avatar of this movement, according to Gregg, is Rob Ford, whom he describes as  "a leather-lunged, no necked, know-nothing." And in case you think that’s an insult, Gregg goes on: "In Rob Ford’s instance, his very crudeness and unrefined nature made him seem ‘real’ and signalled he was not trying to hide anything from voters." That is to say, Rob Ford won the race for mayor of Toronto because he’s authentic.

Allan Gregg is far, far, far, from the only person to have made this argument. The "Rob Ford is popular because he’s authentic" line started during the 2010 election and continues even as he fights to keep his job over allegations that he’s a crackhead. Here are some selected examples:

We've got some fascinating artifacts of authenticity on our political stage today, some good, some troubling. When Rob Ford was first elected, I stood in a public square listening to him speak, thinking, uh oh, this man is trouble for all who oppose him. Why? Because the mayor says what he means, and he doesn't give a flying fig what opponents think of him. — Judith Timson, Toronto Star, April 2013

Ford, who won by running as an unrefined, yet garishly authentic, outsider, is an outsider once more. His war against the downtown establishment - they of bike lanes and gravy trains - can now continue with renewed relish, and perhaps even success; if Ford runs again, he may well win. — Adam Goldenberg, Ottawa Citizen, November 27 2012

Christie Blatchford has written a number of columns lauding Ford for his "authenticity", and while she has made a point of saying that she regrets voting for him, she also makes a point of reminding readers why she voted for him in the first place. The key for Blatchford is not who Rob Ford is, it is who he is not: He wasn’t a part of what she calls "that soft-left ruling class” that likes to think they run Toronto. And so we get to:

Mr. Ford is surely deeply flawed. Well, so are most of us, me anyway. But, to use a modern term, he is also authentic. — Christie Blatchford, National Post, November 26 2012.

I could pile up the examples like cordwood — just Google “Rob Ford” and “authentic” and your evening will be shot — but you get the picture. The question is, what are we to make of it? How can we get any critical traction on Rob Ford when we are told, over and over again, that what looks to all the world like a serious problem with his character is actually his greatest asset?

It is tempting to rehearse, yet again, the arguments for why the desire for authenticity in politics is self-defeating, and prone to catalyzing the very problems it purports to solve. But instead I’ll try a different approach and suggest that what is being pitched as “authenticity” is actually something far more dangerous, for both the electorate and for the leader who cloaks himself in its embrace.

For starters, Ford’s supporters consistently mistake populism for authenticity. Authenticity, at its purest, represents a perfect alignment between the inner self and its outer manifestation. It describes someone who is self-contained but transparent to the world, innocent without being naive, and sincere without being cloying. Such a person, if he or she ever existed, would make an absolutely atrocious politician.

Rob Ford is not authentic. Instead, he’s just another populist. And in the current climate of North American politics, populism is just another put-on, a mask, a front, that some politicians adopt in order to seem like one of the people. In America, populists thump bibles and kiss babies and warn against commies and talk about craw fishin’ or huntin’ and talk about the Heartland and Families and the Family Farmer. In Canada, populists write books about hockey and hold press conferences at Tim Hortons and warn against commies and talk about hockey and warn about crime and defend the Family Farm and give medals to hockey players.

Again, populism is not authenticity. It’s a pose, a marketing position, a brand. And it is just as phony as any other political posture out there. Sometimes it works, as it did for Rob Ford. And sometimes it flames out spectacularly, as it did for that moose huntin' maverick mom, Sarah Palin. 

But it isn’t clear that Rob Ford is even much of a populist. About the only truly populist kite he’s ever flown is the whole stop-the-gravy-train thing, which some people thought meant he was committed to lowering taxes. As it turned out, he actually thought there was a literal gravy train at City Hall and that stopping it would fix Toronto’s finances. He’s also a bigot and pretty obviously hates the gays, and if you want to call him a populist on those grounds, you’re welcome to the term and the baggage it brings with it.

No, there’s something more basic to Rob Ford’s personality, and there’s nothing that appealing, about it: the man has zero self-control. Whether it is reading while driving himself to work, drinking at official functions, going to KFC while on a much-publicized diet, or allegedly smoking crack and hanging out with drug dealers, it is clear that Rob Ford is simply incapable of resisting temptation, delaying gratification, or otherwise acting in a manner that is in anything other than his short-term interest.

And — it is crazy that this needs pointing out — there is nothing politically or morally praiseworthy about this. In the Republic, Plato hailed rational self-mastery of the passions as the key to both personal well-being and the proper functioning of the city. A few thousand years later, Freud suggested that the control of the id by the super-ego, moderated by the ego, was the key to being a properly formed adult, and the lynchpin of civilisation. In between and since, no one has seriously made the case that rule by the passions, the id, the animal instincts, whatever you want to call it, is a viable way to run a polity of any size. More to the point, no one has credibly argued that this is any way for a grownup to behave. 

Except, that is, Rob Ford’s enablers, whose greatest fear is that Rob Ford will go to rehab and expose their ongoing support for what it really is: a dangerous and foolish egging-on of a very sick man. Which is what makes Rob Ford into less of a buffoon and more of a tragic figure. It turns Rob Ford into the Amy Winehouse of Canada.

Remember the first time you heard Winehouse singing “Rehab”? I do. I loved it.  The casual defiance, the stick-it-to-the-man refusal to go along with square society’s medicalization of boozing.  Which is weird, because I actually co-wrote a book critizing that very attitude – the studied rebellion that treats every institution, from grade school to the hospital, as part of the great conformist system of mass society.

But love it I did. We all did, for mostly the same reasons. Why should Amy Winehouse go to rehab? After all, weren’t her problems – her drinking, the drugs, the depression and the self-harming – the very font of her art, her creativity, and her soul?  “Rehab” became a rallying cry for barflies everywhere. It also showed that, despite decades of public education on this issue, we still don’t take seriously the proposition that alcoholism, drug abuse, and even depression, are actual illnesses.

Imagine if, instead of being an alcoholic, Amy Winehouse had cancer. And imagine she wrote a song called “Chemo” with the lyrics “they tried to make me go to chemo, I said ‘no, no, no’”.  Or if she had an infection, and she sang “they tried to give me antibiotics, and I said ‘no, no, no.” It would be a joke. But deep down, most of us don’t quite accept that alcoholism or drug addiction are diseases like any other. It’s self-destructive, sure, but there’s also something romantic about it.  These are not new observations: the celebration of fucked-up artists is one of the defining features of our culture. When Amy Winehouse recorded “Rehab,” she was telling the world that she didn’t buy into the notion that her drinking was an illness that needed treatment. When we bought the record by the millions and gave her a Grammy for it, we told her we agreed.

Did this popular support play a role in her subsequent death? When she sang about not going to rehab and we cheered and called her authentic, did she internalise the value system we were pushing on her?  That is, I wonder if Winehouse, like others before her and since, bought into her self-image as a messed-up singer of the blues, which made it that much harder for her to get clean.

I'm not suggesting she was simply playing a role, or that she killed herself in the name of cred, but there is a powerful looping effect in all of our identities. All identities are social constructs which get their power from being recognized by others. As a result, there is a feedback loop in our identity construction, where we internalise the norms that govern our chosen (or assigned) identities. When the norms of a given identity contain a built-in mechanism for both radicalisation and self-destruction (as they do for an identity like "messed-up singer of the blues"), it is not hard to see how it could become literally inescapable.

So then imagine you one day find yourself the mayor of one of the biggest cities in North America. You aren’t without your charms, and the people around you aren’t without political savvy. But you also have serious personal problems, which play havoc with your health, your personal life, and threaten your ability to do even the most minimal parts of your job. Yet the worse things get, the more you spiral down, the more your so-called supporters cheer you on.

What would you do? Where would you go? Who would you turn to for advice? In such circumstances, I think you would hope you could rely on someone who has known you all your life, who loves you for who you are but who knows that who you are involves habits and appetites that, unchecked, might get you and even others killed. That is, you would hope there was someone close to you who loved you like a brother.

Does Rob Ford have such a person near him? I honestly hope he does. His life almost certainly depends on it. 

On the stupid "root causes" debate

 

One of the few benefits of growing old is seeing that the cycle of society is a cycle of stupidity; that the same moronic arguments come, and the same moronic arguments go, and that at a certain point it really isn't worth the time and effort explaining to the stupid just why they are so stupid. 

And so it is with this week's typically feigned outrage over Justin Trudeau's comments, made very early after the bombings of the Boston Marathon, that we should look for the "root causes" of these events. My colleague Andrew Coyne has taken time out of his life to explain why there is nothing objectionable about what Trudeau said: 

Recall that Trudeau was speaking in advance of anyone having been named as suspects, or any of their background or possible motives having been identified. We did not know what or whom we were dealing with: an organized conspiracy, or a lone nutter. But he was right to suggest that whoever did it would have to be someone who had become, for one reason or another, detached from basic social norms: as he put it, “who feels completely excluded, completely at war with innocents, at war with a society.”

This is so obvious that it beggars belief that anyone would try to find anything nefarious in Trudeau's remarks. But it brings to mind a similar occasion, over a decade ago now, when Jean Chretien was similarly chastised by the Canadian right for proposing that, as part of its response to the attacks of 9/11, the US government should maybe seek to understand the root causes of the attacks. 

For his efforts, Chretien was slammed in the pages of the Wall Street Journal by one Marie Josee Kravis, a quasi-Canadian turned New York socialite whose major claim to fame is having been been one of the most completely clueless members of the board of Hollinger in the early years of the millennium. I was asked to respond to Kravis's column by the opinion page editor of the Ottawa Citizen, long before I ever imagined I might one day work for the paper. 

The column I wrote bears the marks of the angry young man posturing that was a signature of my writing at the time, but there's so much of the piece that resonates with the current debate I think it is worth posting in full. To paraphrase Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused: I get older, but the arguments stay just as stupid. Here's the column:

Gagging on U.S. whine: Offering an explanation for terrorism is different from justifying acts of terror. Why can't people understand that?

The Ottawa Citizen 

Sat Sep 28 2002 

Like Conservative lead-er Joe Clark a few weeks back, I find myself in the curious position of coming to the defence of Jean Chretien.

 Once again, our prime minister is under fire for an interview he gave to CBC-TV last summer and for a speech he recently gave at the United Nations, in which he allegedly suggested that "western arrogance" might have contributed to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. This latest salvo, by Marie-Josee Kravis, was published on Thursday in the Wall Street Journal and reprinted on this page yesterday.

Mrs. Kravis's article was so full of twisted analysis and half-explained history that it is hard to know where to begin. So why not begin with the first sentence, which finds Mrs. Kravis wondering, "Why is JeanChretien so intent on finding a justification for terrorism?"

I have read the CBC transcript of the interview a dozen times, and I won't pretend to understand every sentence. But one thing Mr. Chretien was certainly not doing was trying to find a "justification" for terrorism, nor was he "blaming the victim" for the attacks. What he was trying to do was grope toward an understanding of the factors that might have inspired the attacks, and which might lead to similar problems "10 or 20 or 30 years from now."

Setting aside the question of whether "western arrogance" and global wealth disparities are what motivated Osama bin Laden and his crew -- I think not, and it is not obvious from the interview that Mr. Chretien thinks so either -- I fail to see what the fuss is about. Offering an explanation for something is conceptually distinct from offering a justification for it.

It is commonly observed in Canada that factors such as poverty, drug addiction and lack of education can lead to a life of crime. When we point this out, we do not thereby justify the crime, nor do we "blame the victim." This is so obvious it is painful to have to spell it out. Mr. Chretien was simply applying this pattern of domestic analysis to the global community. Again, there is nothing here that hints of what Mrs. Kravis calls "misplaced pity for terrorists."

Mrs. Kravis argues that what poor countries need is better access to world markets, which will give them sustained economic growth. Of course they do. But these countries also need a functioning, vertically integrated civil society, stable government, the rule of law, and civil and political liberties; otherwise, economic reform will simply make things worse. Just look at Russia, where most of the existing social capital was destroyed more than a decade ago by western economic geniuses more in the grip of ideology than good sense.

But don't take my word for it. This leftist "social capital" mumbo-jumbo, including the Russia example, is taken straight from the World Bank's Web site, at www.worldbank.org/poverty/scapital/.

I am sure this is all too soft-headed for Mrs. Kravis. She suggests that Mr. Chretien should learn some lessons from Pierre Trudeau, who knew how to deal with terrorists. Send in the army, arrest anyone who looks suspicious, and refuse to consider any sort of political accommodation. Any Americans getting their Canadian history from Mrs. Kravis's article would have been left with the distinct impression that Quebec separatism was killed off once and for all in 1970, since, as she says, it was "Trudeau's resolve that restored order and deterred future terrorist incidents."

Actually, a more plausible explanation is that the FLQ's violent energies were sublimated into the democratic separatist movement that still exists. Quebec separatists just went from blowing up mailboxes to trying to politically blow up the entire country, and they might well have succeeded if it weren't for 30 years of political accommodation, much of it led by Mr. Trudeau. But again, don't take my word for it, read a history book. Or, if that's too hard, read the entry on the "October Crisis" in the Canadian Encyclopedia.

Halfway through her article, Mrs. Kravis takes leave of her original argument and goes off on a rant about the unbearable lameness of Canadian nationalism. She attributes Mr. Chretien's pro-terrorist feelings to his frustrations with the U.S., and even dusts off the old stuff about anti-Americanism being our unfortunate substitute for a true national feeling and self-confidence. Spare me.

To begin with, even the most hostile reading of Mr. Chretien's remarks doesn't come close to the sorts of things that have appeared in Harper's and the New York Times. Second, Mr. Chretien suggested that the powerful should try to be "nice," which Mrs. Kravis interprets as a bit of pique over President George W. Bush's notorious failure to praise Canada for its post-Sept. 11 support. That is doubtful. If anything, Mr.Chretien meant "be nice" as in "don't give money and guns to evildoers like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein," -- which the Americans did for a long time.

Mrs. Kravis insinuates that Canadians are hypocritical for feeling morally superior to Americans while enjoying access to U.S. technology, capital and television. Since when are you not allowed to feel superior to the people you're doing business with? Didn't Adam Smith set us all straight on this point? Besides, if you want to talk hypocrisy, let us start with Mr. Bush, the biggest hypocrite of them all.

Probably no man so dim has ever benefited so much from crony capitalism, yet Mr. Bush stands in sanctimonious judgment of the executives of Enron and WorldCom. He promised a "hemisphere of freedom," then slapped trade sanctions on Canadian lumber and jacked up subsidies for U.S. farmers. If there were any consistency to U.S. foreign policy, Saudi Arabia would be part of the axis of evil. And so on.

There is nothing wrong with Canada's national self-confidence that wouldn't be helped if only we had fewer grovelling, pro-Yankee fifth-columnists keeping addresses in Toronto and Montreal so they can dump on Canada and Canadians in newspapers at home and abroad.

There was nothing wrong with what Jean Chretien said to Peter Mansbridge and to the UN. Get over it.

Andrew Potter teaches philosophy at Trent University, Peterborough.

 I no longer teach philosophy, at Trent or anywhere. I'm currently the managing editor at the Ottawa Citizen

On the moral corruption of Zero Dark Thirty

It is bad enough that Zero Dark Thirty is a laughably written, poorly plotted, badly directed and exfoliatingly dull telling of the most dramatic manhunt in our lifetimes. It is also completely, uttery, relentlessly immoral.

Kathryn Bigelow's attempt in the LA Times at defending herself on her handling of the torture issue is inept. 

Steve Coll eviscerates her in the New York Review of Books. 

I join in the pile-on in tomorrow's edition of the Ottawa Citizen, or you can read it online. 

By all means see the movie. 

Gun violence: the economics of abolition

There's lots of talk about America needing to step up on gun control. I suspect that for a lot of people, this is a disguised way of talk about abolition -- that is, the elimination of the private ownership of guns of any sort. 

If so, that's fine. It is certainly worth putting that option on the table and airing it. I doubt it would go anywhere, not in Canada, and not in the USA. But imagine for the sake of argument a government passed a bill outlawing private ownership of guns: it would still be faced with the problem that there are a lot of guns in the country. Stats I've seen vary, with estimates between 250 million and 310 million private weapons on the USA. 

If you wanted to take these off the street through a buyback, what would it cost? Again, buyback programs vary. $200 for a handgun is common, with some programs offering as low as $20 for a rifle. Some programs I've seen have offered $100 gift cards to places like Target. But these are voluntary buybacks, taken advantage of by people who either want to go clean, or have guns they no longer want. A forced buyback program would be far more expensive. 

Assume you wanted to take 280 million guns off the street, at an average buyback price of $200.  Total cost would be $56 billion dollars. (That's probably low, but it's a ballpark).

Would it be worth it? 

[Note: I fixed the math in the next graph thanks to Andrew Coyne's heads up]

Last year in the US, there were 11500 homicides caused by guns. The actuarial value of a human life is $7.4 million. Multiply that, and you have a savings of $85.1 billion, in one year. 85.1-56 is a net savings, minus the buyback costs, is 29.1 billion, call it $30 billion in savings in the first year. But that's not a one-off -- that's $85.1 billion a year after that, every year, compounded. (I think. I forget how to calculate these sorts of things). 

There would be other benefits: lots of people are wounded by guns, so their health care costs and associated other costs would be eliminated as well. But there would be costs as well: it would be foolish to suppose that private gun ownership is a 100% deadweight loss to the economy. 

At any rate, the upshot is that the American government could, if it wanted, easily afford to pay for gun abolition, and it would more than pay for itself in about 8 months. 

Politics: The Naïve and Cynical

A) TWO VIEWS OF POLITICS

1. Here is a naïve view of how politics works.

Politics is about policy. Groups of like-minded people coalesce around a set of ideas about how the world should work. This group is called a party. The party puts forth a platform of policies that will put those ideas into action. The role of the party then is to serve as the interface, or point of friction, where ideas become policies. To gain power, the party promotes and sells these policies to the public as better than those of their opponents.

Thus, the adversarial nature of politics is essentially a debate between objectively superior policies. An election campaign is when the marketplace of ideas is open for business. It is like a graduate seminar in philosophy, where ideas are freely debated, the principle of charity is in full operation, and the best ideas win, whatever their source. 

The goal of this public debate is truth: Truth regarding the demands of justice, the requirements of redistribution, and the scope and character of the public goods that state should offer.  The more people have input into the process, the closer we will be to the truth.

When the party with the best ideas wins, and the better policies are thereby implemented, the country as a whole is better off. As John Stuart Mill taught us, truth is both partial and non-rival -- that is, everyone can share in the truth without it being minimised or depleted.

The crucial trait of a successful politician is that he or she be intelligent. Political leaders should be smart people. Better: they should be policy wonks, charismatic academics, philosopher kings who will rule in the better interest of all. The model naïve politician is someone like Pierre Trudeau, or Jack Layton.

2. Here is a cynical view of how politics works.

Politics has nothing to do with policy, it is about power. Joining a political party is not like joining a faculty club, and is more like joining a tribe or a gang. Their overriding function is to gain power and relative status for their group at the expense of people of other tribes and gangs.

Therefore, a party platform is not a list of policies seen as being in the objective interest of the country. Rather, it is a statement of brand affiliation, or, more simply, identity. The function of the party is to sell its brand or identity as more appealing than that of their opponents. Policies are implemented because of how they appeal to the group and buttress its identity.

Elections are basically popularity contests, not much different from the process of voting for class presidents (read Robin Hanson on this point.) So the point of an election is to make one tribe’s leader seem more appealing than that of the other tribe. The ultimate goal of the exercise is to win power for one tribe. If that requires demonizing the other parties as bad patriots, or bad people, so be it.

For cynics, to govern is to choose between competing interests. There will be winners and losers, with some groups inevitably rising and dropping in status. This is because power is indivisible and rival. One group can only hold it at the expense of others. 

The best politicians are charismatic figures, or gang leaders. They are polarizing figures, ruthless at pursuing the interests of their tribe at the expense of others. Loved, or at least greatly admired by their followers, they are loathed by their opponents.

The successful cynical politician is not necessarily intelligent. What matters is that he is authentic. The relevant question is not “does he have good ideas” but rather “is he a proper representative of my tribe?” The model cynical politicians are men like Jean Chrétien, or George W. Bush.

 B) A FEW COMMENTS

As used here, the terms "naïve" and "cynical" are not intended invidiously. Instead, they are intended to describe the two extremes of a continuum. Different countries might have different political cultures: some might tend to be more naïve in practice, while others might be more cynical. Citizens of different countries might prefer to be at different points on the spectrum. Some institutions might be more conducive to one form over another.

Yet there is an obvious normative quality to this continuum. Not only can it be used to describe how politics does work, it can also be used as a language in support of reform (or in support of the status quo): we may think that politics ought to be more cynical, or ought to be more naïve.

In fact, the most significant political divide in Canada, and perhaps other polities, is not between left and right, but between those who are cynical and those who are naïve about politics. It informs almost all other opinions about how our political machinery -- including Parliament, the courts, the party system, the electoral system, the media -- should function.

Some examples:

• The naïve will be in favour of coalition or minority governments and proportional representation. The cynical will prefer majority governments and first past the post.
• The naïve will have faith in a deliberative approach to democracy. The cynical will rest content with more Schumpeterian forms.
• The naïve will desire more power for individual MPs or representatives, calling for more free votes in particular. The cynic sees the party as paramount, with party discipline the basis of all political engagement.
• The naïve will curse the growing reliance on negative advertising as antithetical to the truth-seeking essence of politics. The cynical will see such framing, and the resulting culture of "truthiness," as useful to the in-group/out-group definition that is at the core of political engagement.   

Most arguments between pundits and academics consist of disguised disagreements over which mode of politics is better, the naïve or the cynical. Indeed, most apparently partisan disagreements are, if you scratch the surface, differences of opinion between cynics and naïfs.

To decide whether one is cynical or naïve is the most important meta-political decision one has to make. It is unfortunate that we spend so much time arguing about our partisan biases, and pay so little attention to our meta-political commitments. Whether that itself suggests that we are all, deep down, cynics (or perhaps meta-cynics) is an important question.

Why the truth squads can't beat truthiness

My latest column for the Citizen looks at the entirely salutory development, during the last U.S. election cycle, of media getting back to their old role as fact-checkers. The problem, though, is that fact checking is only effective when truth is seen as a necessary element of political success.

In the age of truthiness, the  "problem with the effort to truth-squad our way back to fact-based politics is it misunderstands the way political persuasion works. Successful politicians don’t win over the electorate by giving them a set of plausible facts that in turn motivate a set of policies, they sell them on an attractive narrative. The best politicians, from Reagan to Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, are storytellers."

Link

There is no Muslim Tide

This isn’t to say that there aren’t problems with Muslim immigrant populations in parts of Europe, especially France, Germany and Holland. But in every case, the troubles can be traced to one of three causes: fallout from past colonial relationships; domestic policies that hinder the ability of immigrants to work, to worship and to naturalize; or the particular character of the immigrant community and how it interacts with the host country. So, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis in London are not the same as North Africans in Paris or Somalis in Ottawa. But regardless of how these isolated problems are (or are not) resolved, the key point is that they have virtually nothing to do with a grand Islamic takeover project.

That's from my review of Doug Saunders' new book, The Myth of the Muslim Tide. 

"the incoherent bleating of the Wasposphere elites"

Terry Glavin is a friend and a comrade, and man alive I hope it stays that way. If I ever find myself on his bad side, I hope he is a good long hike from the nearest computer. 

Terry took a summer break from columnizing for the Ottawa Citizen, but he's back today, weighing in the hand-wringing over the closing of the Canadian embassy in Tehran and the expulsion of Iran's diplomats from Ottawa. His big target is Ottawa Centre MP Paul Dewar, who lamented the absence of more "robust diplomacy." After giving a short laundry list of the sorts of things Iran's fellow travelers get up to:

It is by these instructive evidences that “robust diplomacy” betrays itself as something worse than mere war. It’s cannibalism with table manners, and nobody has any business calling themselves a socialist, a liberal, a progressive or a social democrat if they engage in anything of the kind.          

Two concepts of secularism and Canada's two solitudes: A limited defence of Pauline Marois

There is a lot that divides anglo and franco in Canada: Leafs vs Habs, Corner Gas vs Tout le Monde en Parle; Air Farce vs Juste Pour Rire. But nothing says “two solitudes” more than the distinct approaches to secularism you’ll find in Quebec and in the ROC.

The depth of the mutual incomprehension was revealed recently during the Quebec election campaign, when Parti Québécois  leader Pauline Marois released a platform item called the Charter of Secularism, which would forbid public employees from wearing any religious symbols while at work. So, no turbans or hijabs or kirpans or that sort of thing. On the other hand, a crucifix necklace would be ok, as is the crucifix that hangs in the legislature in Quebec City.

According to Marois, the new charter (and its notable exceptions) would serve a dual purpose. First, it would assert the principle of the neutrality of the state. And second, it would affirm the particular place of Catholicism in Quebec’s history.

"Wanting to take a step toward ensuring the neutrality of the state doesn't mean we deny who we are," she said while campaigning. "It simply means we are at a different moment in our history.

For this she was given the standard moralizing treatment the Anglophone media traditionally reserves for Quebecers at home and Republicans abroad: From the Globe and Mail: “On tolerance of minorities, Pauline Marois is showing the opposite of leadership.” From the Toronto Star:  “PQ’s ‘secularism’ masks European-style intolerance”. (According to the Citizen’s Robert Sibley, Marois’ problem is not that she is intolerant, but that she isn’t intolerant enough. But that’s another argument).  The upshot is that when it comes to asserting both state neutrality and Quebec’s Catholic origins, Marois was seen in the ROC as a hypocrite at best, but more likely a rank xenophobe.

Here’s a more charitable interpretation of the Charter of Secularism: It expresses a philosophically legitimate approach to the question of the proper relationship between church and state, albeit an approach that may no longer be appropriate to the challenges that Quebec faces in dealing with minorities.

There are two broad theoretical versions of the secular state (taken from Charles Taylor’s essay, “How to Define Secularism”). Each affirms the idea of a neutral state, but the form that neutrality takes is shaped by the problem it is designed to solve.

On the first view, the goal of secularism is to control religion, to “define the place of religion in public life, and to keep it firmly in this location.” As Taylor points out, this doesn’t need to involve any overt repression, “provided various religious actors understand and respect these limits."

On the second view of secularism, the point is not to control religion narrowly understood, but to manage the entire spectrum of comprehensive worldviews. These include organized religious outlooks, but also encompass vague types of spiritualism, scientism, atheism, and competing philosophical doctrines such as utilitarianism and deontology. All of these have differing (and possibly incompatible) notions of the good, and will hence come into conflict in the public sphere. The point of the neutral state is to find a way of accommodating and mediating between all of these worldviews.

 Let’s call the first secularism “French,” and the second, “English”. They correspond, more or less, to the forms the emerged out of post-Enlightenment France and England, and they are responses to the distinct challenges religion posed to each society. For France, secularism was a response to monolithic and heavy-handed Catholic authoritarianism. In England, secularism was part of the liberal tradition that sought to mediate between multiple competing worldviews.  

You can see the downstream effects of both these challenges in the way France and the UK approach secularism today. France continues to treat it as a way of controlling religion by purging it from the public sphere – hence the 2004 ban on conspicuous religious symbols in schools (sound familiar) and Sarkozy’s 2011 ban of the burqa and other face coverings.

For its part, the UK has fully embraced the interpretation of secularism – usually called “multiculturalism” – as a device for allowing the maximum amount of freedom that is compatible with the same degree of freedom for others.

It doesn’t take a great imagination to see how these two conceptions of secularism have been transposed into the Canadian context. The ROC is a fairly typical multicultural state, again with a few tweaks and variations from the sort found in the USA, the UK, and Australia. For its part, Quebec has pretty much copied the French approach, with a slight difference: Quebec still sees value, and little harm, in permitting Catholic symbols in official and public spaces.

But (goes the objection), isn’t this “slight difference” a major problem? Isn’t Marois’ proposal to allow the crucifix to remain in the legislature a sign of her profound bad faith?

I’m not so sure. Montreal is one of the most secular and irreligious cities on Earth, but its residents go about their business in the shadow of a giant cross that glowers down at them like a stern bishop. But no one takes it seriously, any more than anyone takes seriously the crucifix in the national assembly. The reason rests in the big difference between the French Revolution and Quebec’s: The complete absence of violence here in the New World. Quebec’s was a Quiet Revolution; there were no beheadings, and there was no need to strangle the last king with the entrails of the last priest. All Quebecers had to do to shuck off the church was take control of their education and health care systems.

This is an important point: Quebecers don’t see any need to ban Catholic symbols from public space, not because they are hypocrites, but because those symbols are no longer a threat. That battle has been fought and won. But the symbols of other, foreign religions are seen as a threat to the secular order, hence the perceived need to control their use.

If this sounds like special pleading, consider a comparable case: the ongoing public funding of a separate school system for Catholics in Ontario. By any reasonable standard, the separate school system is an affront to liberalism, multiculturalism, anglo-secularism, whatever you want to call it. There is simply no rational justification for it, apart from the fact that it’s in the constitution. But when Conservative leader John Tory ran an election campaign a few years ago promising to even things up by allowing funding for all religious schools, he was mocked into political oblivion. Ontario Liberal premier Dalton McGuinty’s ongoing defence of the status quo is far more hypocritical than Pauline Marois’ charter when it comes to consistent secularism.

This is not to say that when it comes to French versus English secularism there is nothing to choose, that each is a matter of local taste mixed with historical happenstance. Each form of secularism was an institutional response to a specific threat, and each served their respective societies quite well. But looking to the future, we can’t say that each is equally suited to the challenges that they face. In particular, the French/Quebecois model is overly focused on the threat of religion narrowly understood.

Neither France nor Quebec are in any danger of being taken over by a single religion – they are not about to revert to theocracies. The real problem is the same one confronting every other major industrialized democracy, viz., the challenge of managing deep  and irreconcilable diversity. Spending time and energy and capital trying to keep each new religious group in its place is political and cultural wack-a-mole. Instead, they should concentrate on putting in place programs and policies and institutions that will allow the fantastic diversity that their societies have to offer to co-exist.

If the rest of Canada has better policies, and better practices, it is largely thanks to historical factors that are none of our doing. If we insist on taking credit for them while making invidious comparisons with Quebec, the least we could do is make sure that we’ve purged our institutions of all inherited biases.

How politics escaped the clutches of reason

In a new essay I wrote with Joseph Heath, we try to explain how our politics came to be dominated by "truthiness", bullshit, and the rejection of facts. On the story we tell, our descent into unreason began with the confluence of two crucial events: The election of Ronald Reagan, the Great Confabulator, and the launch of CNN, which inaugurated the 24hr news cycle. Here's a snippet from the conclusion:

Reason is not neutral between civilization and barbarism, and neither is intuition. Some things can be “framed” more easily than others. Tax resistance can be framed in a number of highly intuitive ways -- “They’re taking your hard-earned money!” being the most obvious. The case for paying taxes, on the other hand, is difficult to frame in an intuitive way. This is not an accident. The logic of taxation — the reason why markets fail to provide public goods, so that the state must intervene — is slightly counterintuitive. It’s not beyond the capacity of the average citizen to grasp, but it takes at least five minutes to explain — a lot longer than the current environment tends to allow.